


try to find some place to rest your bones

by piggy09



Category: Orphan Black (TV)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Afterlife, Canonical Character Death, Gen, Helena warnings, Orphan Black spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-30
Updated: 2014-01-30
Packaged: 2018-01-10 14:58:10
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,692
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1161041
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piggy09/pseuds/piggy09
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Helena makes it up to heaven, as all good angels do.<br/>...Obviously there's been a miscalculation, though. Angels go to heaven. Abominations don't.</p>
            </blockquote>





	try to find some place to rest your bones

**Author's Note:**

> Inspired by a conversation with [sarahmanningyeah](sarahmanningyeah.tumblr.com), where I said:
> 
> ob epilogue: helena floating up to heaven and just doodlin around on a cloud like “i don’t know what just happened”  
> and beth as the oNLY CLONE IN HEAVEN NOT KILLED BY HELENA is like “yo sis you effed up”
> 
> ...Of course, with so many WIPs the only logical thing to do was to begin writing this _immediately_.
> 
> If you'd like a soundtrack to this fic, the accompanying playlist can be found [here](http://sharkodactyl.tumblr.com/post/75764606150).

You are quick enough to see the twitch of Sarah’s finger on the gun and then everything hurts very much and then you have fallen on the ground. You are bleeding, distantly, but that doesn’t hurt quite as much as the thought of Sarah not _wanting_ you. _I gave you everything,_ whispers Tomas in your head except he is you and you are in the cage Sarah is looking at you through the bars of the cage and you gave her _everything_ , your reason for living, and then she turns.

_Weakness_ , hisses Tomas, and you are too weak. You are too weak, Tomas says, and you are too cruel, Sarah says, and you are

very tired, and you can hear Sarah’s breathing in the dark. It’s a lot faster than your breathing, which is slow and sort of painful. That’s dreamy and distant, though, and as always you can forget about yourself and focus on Sarah. The sound of her breath stumbling over itself. That is a nice sound to fall asleep to, you think.

You decide that you are going to sleep for a little while, and then everything is bright and you no longer hurt.

You no longer _hurt_. You are not bruised, and you can’t feel the scars on your back. You have been stripped of everything, _everything_ , and you sit up fast, like you learned to do, and are met with the vertigo of sky all around you. It is big, and empty, and around your feet cloudstuff is swirling, and you don’t have _wings_ and you don’t know what’s going on and you stumble to the edge of wherever-you-are and look _down_ —

You meet your own eyes from far, far below.

You are making a high animal sound, but it is very distant. Sarah shot you and you are _dead_. Sarah shot you. You are dead.

“I’m dead,” you murmur to the ground, still perched with the ground swirling beneath your feet.

“No shit, moron,” says a voice behind you. You spin, your hair flying like a halo around your face (some things stay the same), and meet Sarah’s eyes.

“Sarah,” you whisper, reverent. She is smiling! You don’t know how she got here, but it will all be okay as long as Sarah as here. This you know for certain. She got you out of a cage. You trust her.

The grin falls off her face. “Nooo,” she says, carefully. “Sarah is still down there.” She points, sharply, to the ground below. “Sorry, kid. My name is Beth.”

You look at her – no, _it_ – and blink, slowly. Then you look at the ground. Sarah has propped herself next to the body. You can see her shoulders shaking, in little tiny gestures, like insect’s wings. You want to hold her again, like Kira taught you. You want to break her apart, and eat her.

A keen escapes your throat. You miss her. It has only been moments, and you miss her. You wish she was dead. You wish she was dead and Kira was dead and that all of you could be here, together. It looks like you’d wasted your time killing all the mockeries. If you’d known you could have been together you would have killed everyone you had ever loved. It would have taken less time. There are fewer of them.

…Speaking of mockeries. Sarah was Not Beth, so this is the detective you should have killed in the first place. You turn back, slowly. Even with the distance that separates the two of you, you can feel the wrongness radiating from it. Abomination. Freak. What sort of hell have you been sent to?

Unless Sarah was right, and you are a mockery too.

You collapse, clouds billowing around you as you pull Sarah’s shirt more tightly around you. It still smells like her, a little. Across from you the godless thing sits down as well. Its hair looks like Sarah’s, and it’s dressed like Sarah the first day you met her. You’re not fooled, though. Something about it is Wrong.

“Earth to crazy clone,” it says, waving its hand towards your face.

“ _No,_ ” you snarl at it, before you can convince yourself it would be better not to speak. In a flash you have leapt from your crouch and you are on its chest, everything in you howling because this is like the first time you met Sarah except everything is _wrong_ and so by doing this you are tainting that memory, breaking it like you have been broken and it is all this _thing_ ’s fault—

“You do not belong here, forgery,” you breathe and everything in you is screaming and shaking and what you want, desperately, is Sarah. But thinking about Sarah sends you into a spiral, so you take your love and you convince yourself it is anger and you direct it at Elizabeth Childs, ex-detective. “How did you make your way up to heaven with no soul?”

It laughs, the sound different from Sarah’s laugh. You think. You’ve never heard Sarah laugh, but you don’t think it would sound like this.

“Did you not figure it out yet?” it asks underneath you, voice filled with a smugness it does not deserve. “You’re here _too_ , stupid. If I’m soulless, you are too. We’re in the same _boat_ , and right now that boat is sailing far down the River Styx.”

It pauses. “Wait, do you even get Greek metaphors? What the fuck am I talking about, you probably aren’t even listening to me.”

You aren’t. In one ear Tomas is screaming and in the other Sarah is murmuring soft, soft. Neither of them are real. No one is going to tell you what to do. You ease off of the copy in a daze and wander back to the edge of the cloud. You sit with your back to the drop and think.

You are human. You are the orig – no. None of Tomas’ words. None of Sarah’s words. Only your words.

You are human. You have a human heart, thudding, and you have a human soul. Sarah also has a human soul. You could feel it in the skin of her knee, warm under the fabric of her clothing. (You wanted to rub her face against her knee. But that is not relevant and if you think about that you will not stop thinking of Sarah and you have to stop thinking of Sarah for now.

You fold the memory up carefully and stick it in your pocket.) You are human, and dead. You have done God’s will. You cannot be in Hell.

…Have you done God’s will?

What if Tomas was wrong?

What if you are in Hell because you sinned and could not stop sinning, your hands red with the blood of women who are human and good and—

“This isn’t Hell, by the way,” says the voice of your empty companion. You look in its direction with a dull hopelessness. It’s sitting on another edge of a cloud, stirring its feet through the stuff of it. “I checked when I showed up. The gang, as they say, is all here.”

It gets up and walks back over to you, throws its weight down in a slump nearby. Sighs.

“You and me, we deserve whatever punishment gets thrown at us,” it says softly. “But the others…they’re better, you know? So. This can’t be Hell.

…If that even helps.”

_The others_ , you think, and then: your hand on a knife. Your hands on a gun. You twitch your head from side to side, but there is only one mockery here. (It’s not you.)

“They’re not here,” the abomination says in its own attempt to be kind. “Can you blame them for not wanting to see you? You kind of…” It shapes its fingers into a gun and points them at you, pulls the finger trigger. _Pchoo_.

“Sarah shot me,” you blurt, because you are confused and scared and alone and Sarah is down there somewhere but she isn’t here and if this thing is empty maybe it can take all of your sadness and anger and pain and you can be better.

The copy blinks at you ( _…lunch?_ ) (no, no, not Sarah, _not Sarah_ ) and snorts. “Way to skip straight to the point,” it mutters. “Yeah, you kind of fucked up. Not like I’m in any position to judge, but…there’s gotta be a better way to show someone you care about them than throwing them against a pillar, asshole.”

You stiffen, and choke down a growl. There is a righteous torrent pushing at the roof of your mouth, and it starts with _abomination_ and ends with _right_ and you are tired. You are tired, and you just want to know what is going _on_.

“I don’t…know…how,” you say delicately. Because you don’t.

“…That’s fucked up,” says the copy – _Beth_ contemplatively. Thinking _Beth_ sends pain through where your wings were and sends Tomas howling in your head. But you don’t have wings anymore, and Tomas is somewhere far below, and you can’t be hurt. There is nothing left to hurt you. You are broken, broken, broken.

“If it makes you feel better,” _she_ says, standing up and brushing cloud from her pants, “I’m pretty fucked up, too.” She reaches down a hand to you. You stare at it, and then at her, and then at her hand again.

You take it.

She pulls you upright easily, and you stumble before standing. Clouds wisp around you. You feel very cold. She starts walking, tugging you to the other side of the cloud. It is not like walking with Kira at all.

(Her hand is cold and callused in yours. If you closed your eyes you could pretend that it was Sarah’s, except Sarah’s hands shook around the gun every single time she pointed it at you. Oh, Sarah does not know how to use a gun.)

Beth drops your hand at another cloud-space, identical to the last except for the view below. There is a big dark room, and a man standing in it. Oh. It’s Paul. He’s taller when he isn’t a photograph.

He was a photograph in Beth’s apartment, you remember dully. You turn and look at her. Her face looks more like yours than Sarah’s. Her eyes look like they belong to a proper abomination. They are as dead as yours are a million million miles below.

“You love him,” you say, to make her look like Sarah again. “This Paul man. But you ruined it.”

She blinks and then her face settles back to the way she looked before. “How do you know who that is?” she asks you. Her posture is sharp and dangerous, like yours.

(You wonder how you could have ever mistaken Sarah for a cop. You love Sarah with a desperation that aches inside of you but she shook under your hands and shook under your knife and even her name, when you heard it first, was shaking. The breath of it was caught in the bag. You still wanted it, all of it.

You are getting the feeling that Beth would not have twitched, if you put your knife against her lips.

Not that you would have wanted to. There is nothing in her mouth you would have wanted.)

You shrug fluidly. “We had a meal together,” you murmur, letting your mouth hang open and your eyes flick-flick-flick away from her face. This posture screams _I am not a threat_. Even when you are a threat, which is always.

“You _what_ ,” says your double, low and dangerous. You keep looking below. She is fixed in your peripheral vision.

You hum neutrally and plop down at the edge of the cloud. Could you take Paul in a fight? Possibly. He is big and strong and you were made to kill small quick things, like yourself. You are a blade and he is a crowbar.

…You think you could kill him, possibly.

Not that it matters now.

He shifts from time to time below you, Paul. He looks absolutely uninteresting. You feel a certain warmth for him, though, because he was fool enough to get himself captured, and send Sarah running after him, and lead you after Sarah. Then you got her _name_. You owe him a small debt.

And since that debt will never be repaid, you’ll pay it forward to Elizabeth Childs.

“Your friend Paul is still yours,” you say lowly. “Sarah told me his name.”

A lie. You are lying. But your debt to Paul is repaid – he gave you Sarah’s name, and Sarah’s head between your hands. You are realizing now that these scraps of Sarah are all you are going to get. Ever. So you are strangely grateful.

Beth chokes out a laugh and sits down beside you. She doesn’t seem to feel comfortable standing while you’re sitting ( _you’re not the original got it you were born of science_ ) (she was so close you could taste her, on your tongue, you could smell her she was _yours_ sister sister sister) (this is not Sarah), you note distantly. You could use that against her. Maybe. Not really any point to it now.

“He’s not my friend,” she says. “He’s like…my Sarah. Except he’s a horrible motherfucker. So he’s more like you and I’m like Sarah, in this metaphor.”

She keeps laughing. She sounds like you again. Below you Paul makes small and uninteresting movements. You are itching to move back to Sarah.

“Sarah _is_ me,” Beth spits out next to you. “Shit, fuck, this is so fucking ridiculous, I’m comforting a woman who looks like me who was – assassinating _other versions of me_ by comparing myself to myself, god.” She laughs, high and thin. “This clone shit never got any less fucking ridiculous. Even after I died.”

You watch her break down without interest. You’d thought that maybe she could help you understand what you had done wrong, so that when Sarah died you could apologize and be a family. It looks like she’s just falling apart, though. Sarah played Beth better than Beth did.

She looks up from where her laughter has turned to sobs and meets your gaze. “Shit,” she breathes, “you don’t give a fuck, do you? You fucking asshole. You’re going to have to live with me, you know. I’m all you have.”

( _you are all_

_you_

_all I_

the metal of the cage between your fingers, in the dark you pretended it was her fingers laced in yours, the hot warm feeling in your chest when you got the phone _Sarah_ when she walked through the door _Sarah_ you held her in your arms and she was shaking, shaking she was so afraid and warm and your heart was singing a high thin note _Sarah Sarah Sarah_

_I love_ )

( _not Sarah not Sarah not Sarah_ )

You shudder, viscerally. All muscles.

“Shit,” she says, and: “fuck. Sorry. Just – stop _shaking_ , shit. Come on, Helena. Pull yourself together. You have a while to go. Can’t give up now.”

She leans close to you, hands not reaching. You look at her eyes and they are nothing like Sarah’s at all and the fire in your chest goes _out_.

“You have no idea what you’re doing, Beth,” you croak finally. The name sits strange in your mouth. You do not use a lot of names.

She snorts, leans back from you. “Neither do you, dipshit,” she says, standing back on her feet. “But don’t worry, we have all of eternity to figure it out.”

You think about Sarah, somewhere below you, with your bruises on her face. The way she is heading towards Kira, pulled towards her daughter way you are pulled towards your sister. The matching bruises on Kira’s face. The way you damage everything you touch.

You think about how quickly Beth took your hand. How her closet didn’t really smell of anything except Sarah. How she waited for you here.

You look at Beth and smile. It doesn’t feel quite right yet, but: you have all of eternity to figure it out.

**Author's Note:**

> Now the people cry and the people moan  
> And they look for a dry place to call their home  
> And try to find some place to rest their bones  
> While the angels and the devils try to make them their own
> 
> Where do bad folks go when they die?  
> They don't go to heaven where the angels fly  
> They go down to the lake of fire and fry  
> Won't see them again 'till the fourth of July  
> \--"Lake of Fire," Nirvana
> 
> I cried three times while writing this and I cried when I thought of using this song for the title and I cried when I listened to it. I am a mess.
> 
> Please leave kudos/comment if you liked! Thanks for reading!


End file.
